Audivision

Side view
Buzzer belt
Full view
Front view

Inspiration

In the creation of this project, we were driven by the desire to assist people with disabilities. To establish a clear goal of the project, we decided to design and create a project aimed towards helping blind people. The main reason for this decision is because we wanted to include a LiDar sensor into our design, and considering how LiDar is used for obstacle avoidance, it seemed intuitive to design a unique and fun creation aimed at helping blind people towards spatial awareness.

What it does

This project helps provide spatial awareness to the blind using a modified white cane and a belt with buzzers. When the user wears the belt, the buzzer on the belt at the angle of the object nearest to them will buzz at a frequency corresponding to its distance from the user. The higher the frequency, the closer the object is to the user, the lower the frequency the farther it is from the user.

How we built it

We used the RPLiDar A1M8 as our lidar sensor that provided us the angle and distance of all the objects within a certain range of the user, and a raspberry pi to interface between the buzzers on the belt and the lidar sensor data. For the code we used python and the RPLiDar and RPi.GPIO library for the logic of how the buzzer’s will map to the angle and distance data.

Challenges we ran into

We learned that this hack might not be very useful to blind people the way that they usually use a white cane given the feedback we received, but decided to complete it anyways as our first iteration. We also ran into issues with input overflow due to our code being slow. We had to optimize our code in order to overcome this issue. Other challenges included the limited hardware that is provided to us, for example broken raspberry pi’s and wires.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to put together this project in the span of this hackathon.

What we learned

We learned the importance of teamwork and could not have accomplished as much if we did not utilize everyone’s strengths.

What's next for Audivision

We initially wanted to use haptic sensors to alert the user of the objects near them but did not have access to them. The next step would be to develop an algorithm that alerts the user of multiple objects within a certain radius at different distances at the same time and use haptic sensors to make the product more user friendly.